Dreaming Spirals

A postcard from Karoda! The title is Textural, and that is an apt description of it. Gorgeous! Thank you, Karoda. It has lots of layered threads and fabric layered under tulle and then all sorts of yarns couched on top.

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I’m posting this for two reasons. 1. To brighten my blog up. I don’t take many photos in half term week. 2. To see if my Hello is working as so many other people seem to be having problems.

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Thank you everyone for your comments and thoughts about naming my website. I thought about it long and hard and appreciate the pros and cons of promoting my name rather than ‘dreaming spirals’. It was, however, Rayna’s comment “raynagillman.com just doesn’t do it for me. No glamour. No pzazz. ” that finally swayed me. “lizplummer.co.uk” doesn’t do it for me either. Even less if anything… So Dreaming Spirals was what I decided on.

I’ve been sweating hard the last few evenings and have more or less hammered out the homepage and basic layout (had a crash course in CSS from the internet in the process; there are some brilliant sites out there!). Having done that, I’ve now got to refine the content and learn all about thumbnails. Watch this space…

We had a fairly fun time at Cadbury World yesterday … it would have been better without the half term crowds, but we stuffed ourselves on chocolate - lots of samples and a fun tasters of yummy melted chocolate. At every turn I bewailed forgetting my camera. “If I had my camera I could blog this….” was the lament several times during the day.

I found a nice fabric shop in the morning visit to Worcester too. I bought some ballpoint needles to see if they make it any easier stitching on soluble fabric and some Janome bobbins because I keep treading on my old one … I’m used to my old machine with metal bobbins. These plastic ones are too flimsy. Are you listening, Janome??

We also climbed the tower of Worcester Cathedral - puff, puff, all 256 steps of it. Wonderful view. More laments.

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This is from Jannie Mylof in the Netherlands. It is lovely and sparkly with lots of beads.

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This one is from Jan Thompson in Georgia. It is called Kites in the Sunset.

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Time for a few more photos of postcards received: this is from Anna Sasse in Nebraska City. The back is almost as nice as the front - she has drawn trees on it so it feels as though you are walking through a wood.

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It’s half term but so far I’ve spent most of it glued to the computer looking at websites. And ‘view source’… And I’ve come to the conclusion that my ideas are a lot too ambitious! I did a ‘Building your first website’ course at the HP Learning Center in the summer but I can’t see it being anything more than pretty basic…. And I’ve found lots of ‘teach yourself html’ websites too. But so far I just feel confused… duh…

Oh well, we’re off to Cadbury World tomorrow. Yummm!

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I was inspired by Deb’s post at her blog Red Shoe Ramblings to compile my own list of favourite books. I noticed that most of the books on The Complete List | TIME Magazine - ALL-TIME 100 Novels that I HAD read were ones which I had studied at school and not read voluntarily. Lord of the Rings was the only exception and that took me 2 years to plough through! I do like reading Evelyn Waugh, though, especially Brideshead!

I don’t know about everyone else, but when I discover an author that I like, I have to read everything they have written if I can get my hands on it so this list will mostly consist of authors rather than individual books. And be heavily weighted to my love of children’s books.

So here we go.

Antonia Forest - all of them.
Elinor M Brent Dyer - author of The Chalet School series.
Cynthia Voigt - Homecoming especially.
Madeleine L’Engle
Jane Austen - Persuasion used to be my favourite but since seeing the BBC series, Pride and Prejudice has taken its place.
Charlotte Bronte.
Neville Shute - A Town like Alice, On the Beach
Daphne du Maurier - especially The House on the Strand
All the Harry Potter books.
Diana Wynne Jones (she wrote Howl’s Moving Castle which has recently been released as an animated film).
Malcolm Saville
Arthur Ransome
P G Wodehouse
Josephine Tey

My ISP has been playing up all weekend - emails keep going on and off… it’s driving me mad!

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